SUMMARY: question about sun mozilla?

From: Gerard Henry <ghenry_at_cmi.univ-mrs.fr>
Date: Tue May 18 2004 - 05:24:53 EDT
Sorry for this late summary, i was very busy with many others concerns.
First i will thank people who responded, and responses was very instructives.

Lars Hecking:
Tim Chipman
Chris Hoogendyk
Marcelino Mata
Daniel.Jaime

I don't receive what i was waiting for, but some clues (sorry for my poor english vocabular):

First, use firefox, and i try it on a blade100, it seems to work well, except for printing. You have to use Xprint explained here:
Sun InfoDoc #ID71966 
but i don't want to install GISWxprint and GISWxprintglue on my prod server.
And it needs somme scripting if you want your users use firefox and thunderbird instead of mozilla, config files are not in .mozilla directory

M. Mateo try to explains me the measures of footprint, but i think i need to compare it with some others products like firefox

Two points:
- first, i want to use sun packages instead of other contributed packages, on a prod server, it simplifies management, and i have some support from sun in case of misfunction
- two, T. Chipman talk about apps launch from a linux server, yes i think he's right, but as long as i can buy sparc machines, i don't want to administer pc machines in server's office, it's a choice...


here is the responses i received:
Lars Hecking:

 As you mention junk control, I presume they are using mozilla for mail?        
                                                                                
 If it's not too big a deal, I'd recommend to use mozilla thunderbird for       
 mail, and firefox for the web. thunderbird can only do pop and imap, though,   
 it can't read a (local of NFS mounted) mail spool.                             
                                                                                

 I don't use thunderbird myself. We have 0.6 installed on Linux, and 0.5        
 on Solaris, I'm waiting for a contributed build (there is one for Solaris      
 8 x86 already). None of the thunderbird users have come back with feedback     
 yet, but there aren't many.                                                    
                                                                                
 We have firefox 0.8 on Solaris and Linux, and I have yet to run into any       
 bugs. I made it my browser of choice nearly 3 months ago, and did not go       
 back to mozilla. The only problem is that an additional package (xprint)       
 is required for printing, but I don't print off the web very often.            

Tim Chipman
for what it may be worth:  we're running a sunray environment here, and         
I gave up on running netscape/mozilla on the sunray server itself a long        
time ago.  We deployed a "small" dual-2400mhz athlon (linux) app-server         
where we run mozilla, openoffice, etc... and then xforward these apps to        
users on the sunray environment.  Since we're using centralized kerberos        
authentication, this can all be done transparently - the user on the            
sunray doesn't really even know their mozilla (etc) are not running             
locally.  The net result is that the sunray server loads are infinitely         
more reasonable ; the sunray sessions are responsive ; the athlon app           
server does all the "grunt work" of actually running mozilla                    
(openoffice, gimp, etc) and of course, since athlon app servers are             
virtually free, we prolong the life of our sunray server at minimal net         
effective cost.                                                                 
                                                                                
Of course, our deployment here isn't huge - we have typically between 20        
and 25 concurrent sunray users, on a total of about 30-35 sunray                
workstations - and we're using an 4x400mhz e450 as the sunray server.           
(we had been using a 2x400 e250 until about 6 months ago, but had an            
easy opportunity to swap in a 450. With current usage, I believe we can         
easily scale to 50 concurrent users before we need to get worried about         
needing any more upgrades...)                                                   
                                                                                
and, to say it clearly: The linux app server, despite being a "generic          
clone box" system, has been absolutely rock-solid. No crashes,                  
instabilities, and the performance is phenomenal. (in my testing,               
athlons run approx equivalent MHZ yield as per UltraSparc II or III             
CPU's, ie, early benchmarks I did on an older dual-athlon indicates that        
a 2x1600mhz athlon system with "3200mhz total" had virtually identical          
CPU performance to an 8x400mhz {ie, also "3200mhz total"} e3500 system          
when running "Blast", a CPU-intensive app we use here frequently).              
                                                                                
Hope this is of some use/interest,                                              


Chris Hoogendyk
for that very reason, I have been thinking about going to Mozilla               
FireFox. haven't had time to get to it yet. take the savings in memory          
useage on the one server and multiply it by the dozens of SunRay users          
on that server, and it's not small peanuts.                                     

Marcelino Mata
Using RMCmemtool memps command I get the following :                            
                                                                                
# ./memps                                                                       
    PID     Size Resident   Shared  Anon     Process                            
  18130   53424k   37800k   26024k   11776k  Mozilla.org 1.6 build for          
Solaris                                                                         
  18202   46920k   37216k   27616k    9600k  SUN Mozilla 1.2.1                  
  20432   42328k   40152k   28136k   12016k  SUN Mozilla 1.4                    
  18224   40032k   32128k   21352k   10776k  Mozilla.org 1.5 build for          
Solaris                                                                         
                                                                                
I started Mozilla with blank screen.  I agree that the memory foot print is     
getting bigger.  I'm not sure if memory size should be based on Size or         
Resident+Shared.  Using Resident+Shared, 1.2.1 is 64.8Mb vs 68.2Mb for 1.4.     
How are you getting 30Mb for 1.2.1?  From research, RMCmemtool gives more       
accurate information vs Solaris "ps -ef", top, Process Manager etc.             
                                                                                
I understand that Mozilla 1.7 is suppose to decrease the foot print to          
Mozilla 1.5 level.  I do not know if that will mean anything to SUN released    
builds.  It looks like Sun 1.4 includes some code from the 1.6 release (i.e.    
single sign-on).                                                                
                                                                                
In general I have noticed that since Mozilla is based on the reference          
platform of Linux and Windows, that the Solaris build is larger since it        
based on older GNOME technology and does not have certain Linux libraries       
like it's font server etc...Optimization wise, Mozilla will probably be         
smaller on Linux.                                                               

I was getting different numbers so I rebooted and tested again.   I also        
installed Mozzila 1.7rc1.  Installing SUN 1.4 unstalled 1.2.1 so I don't        
have those numbers...                                                           
                                                                                
Size     Resident   Shared  Anon     Process                                    
57560k   42208k   28056k   14152k  mozilla 1.6                                  
37384k   30568k   19840k   10728k  mozilla 1.5                                  
44008k   41960k   33432k    8528k  SUN 1.4                                      
56424k   39544k   28776k   10768k  mozilla 1.7rc1                               
                                                                                
Here's the explanation of memory usage from memtool docs....attached is the     
docs for your reference.                                                        
                                                                                
Resident - The amount of physical memory that this file has associated with     
it.                                                                             
                                                                                
Used - The amount of physical memory that this file has mapped into a           
process segment or SEGMAP. Generally the difference between this and the        
resident figure is what is on the free list associated with this file.          
                                                                                
Shared - The amount of memory that this file has in memory that is shared       
with more than one process.          

Daniel.Jaime
why don't you install the actual official stable release 1.6 from               
                                                                                
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.6/contrib/mozil
+la-sparc-sun-solaris2.8-1.6.tar.gz                                             
 .                                                                              
A lot of severe security problems were fixed in this version. The README        
file can be found at                                                            
                                                                                
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.6/contrib/mozil
+la-sparc-sun-solaris2.8-1.6.readme                                             
 ,                                                                              
                                                                                
the Downloadpage at http://www.mozilla.org/releases .                           
                                                                                
Concerning the print environment, you can find in the README file the following 
information                                                                     
  * Printing is supported via Xprint                                            
    (see http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.4rc3/index.html#xprint)       
    xprint.mozdev.org provides various Solaris packages including               
"GISWxprint"                                                                    
    and "GISWxprintglue", for people without (root) permission to install       
packages                                                                        
    the plain tarballs are provided, an alternative prodecure is described      
in                                                                              
    Sun InfoDoc #ID71966 about the same issue (see                              
    http://sunsolve.sun.com/pub-cgi/retrieve.pl?doc=finfodoc%2F71966 - "How     
to add                                                                          
    printers to Netscape[TM] and Mozilla[TM]?").                                
                                                                                
I hope this can help you.                                                       
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Received on Tue May 18 05:24:43 2004

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